The victim, Kuen Yin Ng, 33, was found beaten to death on the rocky shores of the Willamette River, north of the Burnside Bridge under the Interstate 5 ramp to Interstate 84 on Nov. 28, 1989, police said.

When a Multnomah County grand jury in 2012 issued a murder indictment against Garcia-Lopez, he was in custody in Utah.

He was already facing aggravated murder, aggravated sex assault and aggravated robbery allegations in Salt Lake City for an unrelated homicide that occurred 18 days before Portland's killing, records show.

DNA evidence also tied Garcia-Lopez to the Nov. 10, 1989, death of 62-year-old Lela Rockwell in Salt Lake City.

Her discarded nude body was found by a passer-by in a planter box. The cause of death was strangulation. Rockwell was sexually assaulted and also suffered broken ribs, head trauma and had multiple bite marks on her body from her head to her stomach, according to the allegations against Garcia-Lopez.

Garcia-Lopez, also known as Jose Ortiz-Garcia, pleaded guilty last year in Salt Lake City and was sentenced to life in prison, The Associated Press reported.

Garcia-Lopez has been in custody in Utah since July 29, 2010. He previously served federal time in South Carolina.

Multnomah County prosecutors said once Garcia-Lopez' DNA was entered into a national database, police in Portland and Salt Lake City were alerted to matches that popped up to the evidence submitted from the crime scenes of the cities' respective unsolved homicides.

The Cold Case Homicide Unit reviews unsolved murders in the Portland area. Since it was created in 2004, it has solved 40 killings and reviewed about 250 cases, police said.